About

Historically clothing and textiles were considered highly valuable, repaired, passed down and even used as a form of currency. In stark contrast the current fashion system succeeds in stripping garments of their material value rendering them more or less disposable. Lost and Collected documents and maps some of these items of clothing found discarded or lost in public spaces. The growing archive provides a glimpse of the often overlooked everyday implications of the quest for ‘newness’ inherent to the current fashion system. It lays bare the mechanism of the intangible brand value outweighing that of the material or functional qualities. The unconventional ‘fashion collection’ that emerges over time shifts the abject used and mass-produced garment back into the unique and ‘one-off’, for a moment subverting the hierarchy of value in contemporary fashion.

Ruby Hoette is a designer/researcher seeking to expand what constitutes ‘fashion practice’. Her critical and experimental approach proposes alternate modes of engaging with and producing fashion. By framing the garment as a unique artefact carrying traces of social, cultural and economic interactions and transactions her work explores fashion in context and unpicks the complex relationships between object and system. Ruby is a Lecturer and Co-convenor of MA Design Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London.